Greenhouses Embrace Alternative Energy Sources

on Feb 11 in Related stories

[Viability is able to work with greenhouses to secure financial incentives for biomass heating systems]

Fueling a Movement
By Kevin Yanik, Associate Editor
Greenhouse Grower magazine, February 2010

Fuel oil prices were becoming too expensive and natural gas wasn’t an option because it was not being piped into the area. So Grower Direct Farms, a wholesale greenhouse operation in Somers, Conn., began looking seriously at alternative energy sources for its facilities more than a year ago.

Wind. Solar. Geothermal. The list of energy source options available stretched beyond the fossil fuels growers historically had used. Renewable resources were becoming more viable, Grower Direct Farms found, and the more growers were gravitating toward them the closer newer options were to becoming mainstream.

For Grower Direct Farms, biomass was the renewable resource of choice and wood chips became its fuel. Now, the operation primarily uses wood chips to heat its greenhouses, and fuel oil is its secondary source. And like most growers who’ve moved to alternative energy systems, Grower Direct Farms largely made the transition because of rising fuel costs.

“Energy is one of the most important areas of our business in terms of the cost of our product,” says Sam Smith, sales manager at Grower Direct Farms. “Not just in the way we heat our greenhouses, but the fuel we put in our trucks to move our product, the electricity we consume to light the product we grow and just to do basic things like run our offices and computers.”

Heating greenhouses is one of a grower’s most costly expenses, though. And the more burdensome fossil fuel costs get, the more growers are turning to alternative energy solutions.

“Energy usage has been and will continue to be an area of concern for growers,” says Randy Monhemius, an Ohio-based business program specialist for USDA’s Rural Development program. “I believe growers are looking to save money, or at least manage costs better through the installation of energy-efficient improvements or renewable energy.”

From Propane To Wood [thumbshot url=http://greenhousegrower.com/magazine/?storyid=2969]
Rick Webb, owner of Webb Perennials in Logan, Ohio, was one grower looking for cost savings when propane approached $2.50 a gallon last year. Propane simply isn’t affordable for his small operation when it’s over $2 a gallon, Webb says, so he sought relief in the form of biomass.

Nearby Hocking College hosted a biomass workshop that introduced different systems to him. Webb got a few ideas, did some research on his own and tried to determine which wood form would produce the best, most-efficient heat for Webb Perennials.

“I’ve done a fair amount of research looking at different options,” Webb says. “The (wood) chip system would have been nice if my operation was a little bigger. I was looking at a system but then we got up to like $120,000 potentially and I still didn’t have a front-end loader to handle them.”

Eventually, Webb settled on logs and he installed a wood gasification boiler to accommodate them. His system is not automated – he loads logs into the boiler by hand – but automation did not make financial sense for Webb because he only needed to heat a facility that’s less than a half-acre.

“I live in an area where there’s a lot of firewood,” he says. “It’s Southeast Ohio – 90 percent forested area. There is a lot of firewood available. By the time I finished and built a barn to store wood, I only put $32,000 into it.”
Midway through the process, Webb Perennials was awarded an $8,000 USDA Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) grant. It ultimately paid for one-fourth of Webb’s system.

Now that Webb’s system is up and running, he’s using wood as his primary fuel with propane as the backup.

“If I don’t get out in time to stoke the wood boiler, the propane kicks in,” Webb says. “I’ve used 300 gallons of propane (as of January 5) and I probably would have used 3,000 gallons so far. I have my wood delivered and split. We stack it here. And I’ve figured the equivalent to 3,000 gallons in propane costs $1,000 in wood.”

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